Brazilians Vote Today for President In a Free and Unpredictable Election

By JAMES BROOKE, Special to The New York Times

Published: November 15, 1989

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 14—
After a gap of 29 years, Brazilians vote for president Wednesday in the first round of elections expected to set the direction for Latin America's largest nation in the 1990's.

With 82 million voters headed for the polls, Brazil takes a key step toward becoming the hemisphere's second most populous democracy after the United States.

For 80 percent of the voters, the election represents the first chance to vote for president. Given the electorate's inexperience, analysts today could only agree on one prediction - that Fernando Collor de Mello, a 40-year-old center-right former state governor, will be one of the two candidates making the runoff scheduled for Dec. 17.

The other slot is hotly contested by two socialists, Leonel Brizola, a fiery 67-year-old former governor, and Luis Inacio da Silva, a 44-year-old trade unionist with strong Marxist support. 'Lula' Draws Huge Crowds

In a thundering finale to his campaign, Mr. da Silva, widely known as ''Lula,'' drew crowds of more than 100,000 to a series of weekend rallies in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. Known as Brazil's ''industrial triangle,'' these three states account for 44 percent of an electorate distributed over 26 states and territories.

Favoring Mr. da Silva, the name Lula leads the list of 21 candidates on the ballot, and his party, the Workers' Party, is widely considered the best organized in Brazil.

''My guess is that the Workers Party will probably have five times more people at the voting stations than anyone else - and that means a lot in a country where 70 percent of the people don't have a party and 35 percent don't have a candidate,'' said Alfred Stepan, a visiting political scientist from Columbia University who has written several books on Brazilian politics.

Nervously watching Mr. da Silva climb in the polls, Mr. Brizola lashed out last week against his younger rival.

''Lula is unprepared and incompetent,'' he said, and ''needs more training and less vanity, because experience is not gained from one day to the other.'' Mr. da Silva is the only major contender who lacks a college education. Voting Is Obligatory

Mr. Brizola was deeply marked by the 15 years he spent in exile during the late 1960's and 1970's when Brazil was ruled by Army generals. Mr. da Silva, a federal deputy, has called his rival ''a salesman of old records.''

Indeed, the Brazil that votes Wednesday is radically different from the Brazil that last voted for President in 1960, a year when Mr. Brizola, was governor of Rio Grande do Sul state.

With the extension last year of voting rights to the illiterate and to 16-year-olds, this election will be decided by Brazil's poor. Voting is obligatory in Brazil, with violators facing a series of fines and sanctions.

In the fullest expression of democracy in Brazil's 100-year history as a republic, 57 percent of the population is eligible to vote. By contrast, only 22 percent of the population could vote in 1960.

But despite a 17-fold increase in Brazil's gross national product in the last 30 years, this nation remains riven by one of the world's sharpest inequalities in income distribution. 'Aberrant' Income Disparity

Two-thirds of Brazilian families survive on less than $500 a month. With massive migration to cities since 1960, rural poverty now lives cheek by jowl with urban wealth.

''Today they live in the same cities, on the same streets,'' Helio Jaguaribe, a Brazilian political scientist, wrote in his recent book, ''Brazil: Reform or Chaos.''

''In no country of the world, not even in India, are there such aberrant contrasts,'' he said.

Indeed, in India, the poorest 60 percent of the population receive 30.1 percent of the national income. The richest 20 percent receive 49.4 percent of the national income.

In Brazil, the poorest 60 percent of the population receive 16.4 percent of the national income. The richest 20 percent receive 66.6 percent. Few Readers but Many TV Fans

Furthermore, Brazil's economic growth of the last 30 years has failed to make a dent in abysmally low levels of education. Only one-fourth of the electorate lining up at polling booths on Wednesday will have finished primary school.

In a country of 144 million people, the four most influential newspapers of Rio and Sao Paulo sell a total of just one million copies a day.

''Brazil has one of the lowest levels of newspaper readership in Latin America,'' said Eliane Alvarenga, a Sao Paulo researcher on mass communication here. ''Brazil has an oral tradition. Today people are acculturated by television.''

Largely because of television, an unlettered population does not necessarily mean a politically illiterate population. With televisions now in 72 percent of households, up from 5 percent in 1960, an estimated 94 percent of Brazilians watch television regularly.

Ratings surveys estimate that the nightly hour of free political advertising from mid-September until Sunday drew a daily audience of 35 million people.

With the future of the world's eighth-largest market economy at stake, analysts also note that there is little correlation in Brazil between poverty and leftist political voting patterns.

The most recent Gallup poll here gives the largest slice of poor voters, 34 percent, to Mr. Collor, the center-rightist. Mr. da Silva comes in second with 14 percent. The Anti-Corruption Candidate

Mr. Collor's deep appeal to the poor is attributed to his vigorous campaign against corruption. Last year, he captured the nation's fancy by uprooting ''marajahs,'' or overpaid, corrupt government officials, from state bureaucracies.

The leader in the polls since May, Mr. Collor has seen his support slide in the last three months from 45 percent to 25 percent. Seeking to avoid further slippage, he refused to debate other candidates on television.

A largely invisible presence in the campaign has been Jose Sarney, Brazil's highly unpopular president. Since Mr. Sarney took office in March 1985, consumer prices have risen 170,719 percent. Many economists predict an explosion of hyperinflation after the December runoff election.

All 21 candidates are running against Mr. Sarney, including Ulysses Guimaraes, the nominee of his own party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, PMDB.

Although this party controls 22 of Brazil's 24 state governorships, Mr. Guimaraes regularly wins approval ratings of about 3 percent in public opinion polls.

On Sunday, a headline in the O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper offered an epitaph: ''PMDB navigates for 23 years and dies on the beach.''

graph of Brazil's growth since 1960 (Source: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics; Bank of Boston)